Vacation Homes

Civic engagement linked to planning

A new subdivision under construction near Saskatoon in a file photo. A new study suggests the way we build our neighbourhoods affects the ways in which we interact - or don't - with our neighbours.

Photograph by: Vance Lester
, Saskatoon StarPhoenix

There is a strong relationship between the way we have allowed our neighbourhoods, town and cities to be planned, designed and developed over the last five or six decades and the decline in civic engagement that is so obvious in our communities.

A recent survey of Metro Vancouver residents has started to reveal some of those not-so-obvious relationships. The Vancouver Foundation recently published the results of a survey that begins to delve into what prevents people from being more connected in terms of their relationships with their fellow citizens and more engaged in their neighbourhoods and the wider community.

The Vancouver Foundation decided to launch this study because its previous research told it that many community leaders in Metro Vancouver are concerned about a deepening civic malaise that has resulted in more people retreating from community activities and even social interaction of the most basic form. Many rank this corrosion of caring and social isolation as a top community challenge, ahead of issues like poverty, homelessness and the list of other expected social problems.

The researchers who surveyed 3,841 Metro Vancouver residents characterized connections and engagement as two sides of the same coin, arguing that it is only through strong relationships that we can care enough to work together to make our com-munity a better place for everyone. I would go one step further.

We risk finding ourselves in a vicious circle where the centrifugal force of ambivalence spins our neighbour-hoods, towns and cities into a physical state of place lessness, robbing us of places to gather, socially interact and connect, leaving us careless, isolated and detached, with no desire to get involved in trying to make better the physical place that we call home. This study shows this risk is real.

It looked at relationships that people have in their neighbourhoods - the places that are more than just a geo-graphical location, but the centre of family life, personal financial investment and whatever emotional attachment a person has to the place where he or she resides. The data revealed that, despite the long-held view that strong neighbourhood connections are important in city life, neighbourhood relationships in Metro Vancouver are cordial, but not particularly deep. We keep to ourselves, don't often help each other out and are indifferent when it comes to opportunities to strengthen neighbourliness.

Patterns emerged in the data that identified quite clearly that certain groups of people are struggling more than others to feel connected and to be motivated enough to engage. Ironically, the study identified one of those groups by the type of dwelling they live in.

Highrise apartment dwellers clearly struggle more than others with get-ting to know their neighbours. Twice as many apartment dwellers (15 per cent) as those living in townhomes or single detached homes (seven per cent) never chat with their immediate neighbours - the people living in the three or four households closest to them.

An even larger percentage of people living in highrises - 43 per cent of them - don't know at least two of their neighbours' names. Among renters, 39 per cent don't know the names of at least two of their neighbours, com-pared with 18 per cent of homeowners. When researchers probed deeper and asked respondents about the reasons why they might not know some of their neighbours very well, 46 per cent overall blamed it on the fact that they seldom see their neighbours.

This is not surprising. We have allowed the design of our homes and our neighbourhood surroundings to deteriorate when it comes to promoting social interaction and neighbourliness.

Apartment buildings are deliberately designed to promote privacy and security. Key fobs not only control access to highrise towers and the elevators that link these vertical neighbourhoods, but they also limit neighbours in socializing with each other in the building they live when floors are "locked off" to all but those living on them. Lobby areas at the base of highrises are typically small and offer few places to casually gather. Residential corridors are usually dimly lit and narrow, lined with solid doors to individual homes we often refer to by their "unit number".

The ubiquitous garage doors facing streets with non-existent or narrow sidewalks in suburban neighbour-hoods consisting of monotonous rows of single detached homes don't create a more inviting environment for those who hope to encounter their neighbours, let alone desire social frequent social interaction.

The second biggest reason people cited in the survey for not knowing their neighbours can be viewed as indifference - a lack of interest in knowing each other and a desire to keep to ourselves. Again, this isn't a surprising response if you think about that vicious circle fuelled by ambivalence.

If your neighbourhood lacks those physical places that you value for the opportunity they provide to inter-act spontaneously with others and to develop relationships with people who are at first strangers and then your acquaintances, why would you care enough to struggle to reach out and try create those relationships?

What hope should we have that we can get out of this vicious circle that forms that link between cause and effect - placelessness and disengagement? The numbers are some-what alarming. Close to one-third of respondents (29 per cent) agreed that it would be hard to get people in their neighbourhood to work together to solve problems in their neighbour-hood. Less than half (41 per cent) disagreed and said that it would not be hard to get the people in their neighbourhood working together. Not all that promising.

There are other areas of this intriguing study that point to issues around disengagement and a lack of connectedness that clearly find their roots in the way we have planned, designed and built the places where we live, work, play and learn.

I won't go beyond simply mentioning now that they include issues like a tolerance to accommodating in neighbourhoods different groups of people, like the homeless and people with alcohol and drug addictions, or the issue of foreign ownership of real estate - where a slight majority (52 per cent) of respondents believe that there is too much foreign ownership of real estate.

These are issues worth exploring in more detail in future columns, per-haps when the Vancouver Foundation releases more analysis of the data that will correlate answers to questions with people who held certain views on other questions.

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with Counterpoint Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land-use issues. Email: ransford@counterpoint.ca or Twitter @BobRansford

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